The case was decided on a 7-to-2 vote, with Justice Brett
Kavanaugh writing the opinion. He said it broke no new legal ground, but
reinforced the court’s rulings about when a prosecutor’s bias eliminated a
potential juror. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented, according to The Crime Report.
Six times, District Attorney Doug Evans, who is white, has
attempted to convict Flowers, who is black, in what the Post calls “a
prosecutorial pursuit that may be without parallel.” Flowers was charged with
executing four people inside Tardy Furniture Store in the small town of Winona,
Ms.
Two trials, the only ones with more than one African
American on the panel, resulted in hung juries. Three convictions were
overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court for prosecutorial misconduct and improper
maneuvering by Evans to keep blacks off the jury.
The state said Evans had offered race-neutral reasons in the
most recent trial, in 2010, when the prosecutor struck five of six black
potential jurors.
The Supreme Court was not considering the evidence against
Flowers, but looking at Evans’s prosecutorial tactics.
In his dissent, Thomas said the court did not dispute
Flowers was convicted by an impartial jury.
“Today’s decision distorts the record of this case,
eviscerates our standard of review, and vacates four murder convictions because
the state struck a juror who would have been stricken by any competent
attorney,” he wrote. He added: “If the court’s opinion today has a redeeming
quality, it is this: The state is perfectly free to convict Curtis Flowers
again.”
Prosecutors and defense attorneys may use what are known as
peremptory challenges. They can strike potential jurors they simply don’t want
on the jury, and generally those choices cannot be second-guessed.
In a 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court said
the challenges could not be used to strike a potential juror because of his or
her race. Gender was later added as a forbidden purpose.
In Friday’s ruling, Kavanaugh said that the effect of the
high court decision was to “simply enforce and reinforce Batson by applying it
to the extraordinary facts of this case.”
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